What is referred to generically herein as an optical mouse device was first created in 1995 after more than three months of research on how to find a color ball within a video field. One area of particular interest for use of an optical mouse is in television weather broadcasts. The talent, by using an optical mouse, could, for example, move a cloud shown on a display from one position to another by moving a handheld pointing device with a colored ball at its end.
There were two problems:
1. Because the digitalization of a video signal is too far apart from the raw video signal, it is not possible to find a specific color within a full video field.
2. On a system with a slow processor, it is not possible to search the whole image for a single point of color and let another program work in parallel.
Therefore, a way to find the end (or tip) of a person's hand (or of a pointer device) was chosen to bypass the problem. No specific color is necessary to find the end. See U.S. Pat. No. 5,270,820 for a description of this technique.